PHOENIX — The federal government is expected to shut down this weekend, and 21 House Republicans on Friday rejected Speaker Kevin McCarthy's stopgap efforts to prevent that. Three of those representatives are from Arizona.
Reps. Andy Biggs, Eli Crane and Paul Gosar joined other hard-right holdouts and voted against the latest spending bill. This effort, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), has been threatening to boot McCarthy from his position as Speaker of the House.
McCarthy's latest effort would have seen a nearly 30% spending cut to many agencies and added several border security provisions. The 21 Republicans called it insufficient. The White House and Democrats rejected the Republican spending approach as too extreme.
If no deal is struck, the government will shut down at 12:01 a.m. on Sunday, the start of the new fiscal year.
RELATED: McCarthy's last-ditched effort to avoid government shutdown collapses as Republicans defect
The shutdown would leave two million military troops without pay, furlough federal workers and disrupt government services and programs. Several groups, such as the military, law enforcement and immigration enforcement agencies, will continue to work. Courts have enough money to stay open for a time, but could scale back after Oct. 13.
Notably, 72% of the Department of Homeland Security would be without pay.
Despite ongoing Republican cries for tighter border security, this shutdown would leave more than 19,000 U.S. Border Patrol Agents and 25,000 Field Operations Officers working without a paycheck, according to DHS.
In May, President Joe Biden struck a tentative bipartisan deal with McCarthy to extend the debt limit for two years alongside some modest federal spending cuts. That deal has since fallen through.
The United States national debt stands at just over $33 trillion as of September 2023, according to investopedia. Roughly two thirds of this debt has been incurred since 2001 across multiple presidential administrations, according to experts with the Associated Press.
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